لینک کردن مدیریت بلند مدت برای تولید و خدمات

For firms that combine manufacturing and service operations in one system, the task of managing capacity is not straightforward. New goods and services may not have the same set of competitive priorities, and the models and concepts available in the literature for service operations differ from those for manufacturing operations. We address this problem and review the concepts and models for capacity management in the long term in both streams of literature, i.e. manufacturing and services, to develop a unified framework for manufacturing and service operations. The framework creates transparency between new goods manufacturing and service operations, since the same long-term capacity management structure is used for both product types, as well as between capacity strategy and planning strategy, since new goods and services are treated simultaneously. In the framework, the concepts of chase and level strategies are redefined for service operations to allow for integration with manufacturing operations. A case study demonstrates the usefulness of the integrated approach for long-term capacity management.

More and more corporations throughout the world are adding value to their core corporate offerings through services. The trend is pervading almost all industries and is perceived by corporations as sharpening their competitive edges. Modern corporations are increasingly offering fuller market packages or “bundles” of customer-focussed combinations of goods and services. This concept has been coined servitization by Vandermerwe and Rada (1988), and has gained recognition as the term describing the innovative services that have been bundled with goods by firms that had previously been known strictly as manufacturers (Neely, 2008, Baines et al., 2009 and Schmenner, 2009). Schmenner (2009) found that servitization has antecedents that stretch back 150 years; already in the late 1800s there were examples of firms that bundle services with manufactured goods in an effort to reach out to customers in new ways. Baines et al. (2009) provided a review of the modern literature on servitization. Neely (2008) found that firms with servitization are not necessarily more profitable than firms with only goods manufacturing. Consequently, the ways to servitization has to be considered carefully and managed comprehensively.

The long-term capacity management is modeled in a framework with two strategic dimensions. A capacity strategy is concerned with setting the overall capacity level, and a planning strategy is developed for the utilization of capacity. Having a uniform structure and a coherent terminology for manufacturing as well as service operations facilitates a concurrent approach for long-term capacity management of such integrated operations. The contribution of this paper lies in the framework and the case study that illustrates the use of the framework and provides support for its usefulness.